Smart Cards – The Future Technology

Smart Cards – The Future Technology

Many experts and researchers are considering the fact that smart cards will be as important as computers in coming few years this vision of the researchers is containing some errors as the smart cards are not the computers but actually they are as they are indeed tiny computers. It is impossible to predict the various applications that will be happen in future. But this can be possible with the smart cards as they have the ability to follow the same trend of rapid increases in processing power which computers have.

A smart card is the device with an integrated circuit chip which includes micro-controller or sufficient intelligence with the internal memory or memory chip alone. This card can be connected to the reader with the direct physical contact or with the remote contactless radio frequency interface. Through the embedded microcontroller, smart cards are enabling to store the large amounts of data as well as they can carry out their own on cards functions. They can interact efficiently with the smart card reader.

There are two general types of smart cards which are contact and contactless in which a contact smart card can be inserted into a smart card reader along with the direct connection to the conductive contact plate on the surface of the card. These physical contact points can consider the transmission of the commands, data as well as card status.

On the other hand, the contactless card requires only close proximity to the reader. Reader and the card both are containing the antenna as well as two communications by using radio frequencies over this contactless link. Most of the contactless cards can derive power for the internal chip from this electromagnetic signal.

This range is ne half to three inches for non-battery powered cards as well as they are essential for applications such as building entry and payment. There are also two additional categories of cards which are dual interface cards along with the hybrid cards in which hybrid cards is containing two chips, one with the contact interface as well as one with the contactless interface as they are not interconnected.

These dual interface cards are containing a single chip along with contact and contactless interfaces. Through the dual interfaces cards, it is easy to access the same chip by using a contact or contactless interface with a very high level of security.